Increasing axle loads of today’s North American heavy haul freight trains have presented numerous engineering challenges for the design and performance of concrete crossties and fastening systems. Several research studies have been conducted to understand the path of the vertical load from the wheel/rail interface through the fastening system and into the crosstie with successful results. Howev...

Many engineering applications require the knowledge of input forces to mechanical systems. However, in practice, it is quite difficult to measure these forces directly. In order to obtain an estimate of the input forces to structural systems, Kalman filtering based techniques have recently been introduced. These state-estimation techniques allow estimating the forces concurrent with the states ...

Professional paper BIM (Building Information Modelling), or modelling based on object data, is a process that involves the construction of virtual objects, i.e. the creation and management of digital representations of physical and functional characteristics of objects. The BIM system, therefore, is used to create a model using relevant information. BIM is applicable throughout the entire life ...

Although modification operations on multimedia data such as insertion and/or deletion of video clips are rare, they may cause significant degradation of disk I/O performance in disk-array-based video servers. This is because many existing disk-array-based video servers consider only video playback at normal speed and retrieval-oriented VCR-like operations such as fast-forward and rewind without...

• The fifth objective of the AASHO Road Test was as follows: "To develop instrumentation, test procedures, data, graphs and formulas which will reflect the capabilities of the various test sections; and which will be helpful in future highway design in the evaluation of the loadcarrying capabilities of existing highways and determining the most promising areas of further highway research." It w...

A long-span suspension bridge is a complex structural system that interacts with the surrounding environment and the users. The environmental actions and the corresponding loads (wind, temperature, rain, earthquake, etc.) together with the live loads (railway traffic, highway traffic), have a strong influence on the dynamic response of the bridge, and can significantly influence the structural ...

Wind turbines are typically operated to maximize their own performance without considering the impact of wake effects on nearby turbines. There is the potential to increase total power and reduce structural loads by properly coordinating the individual turbines in a wind farm. The effective design and analysis of such coordinated controllers requires turbine wake models of sufficient accuracy b...

This article presents an overview of results from the 1980–1992 survey of snow loads and densities on roofs in deep snow areas of British Columbia with particular emphasis on results from an extensive survey at the ski village on Mt. Washington, Vancouver Island, where the 30-year return ground snow load is 21 kPa. The article makes recommendations for the design of buildings in deep snow areas...

This paper reports on an efficient method of power flow analysis for solving balanced and unbalanced radial distribution systems. The radial distribution system is modelled as a series of interconnected single feeders. Using Kirchoff’s laws, a set of iterative power flow equations was developed to conduct the power flow studies. Due to the voltage dependency of loads in distribution systems, va...

In this paper we study the response of 2D framed structures made of reinforced concrete to the sudden removal of columns. For comparative reasons, the 2D frames are considered as part of 3D structures with same overall structural mass and external load potential. In particular, we study two sets of 2D frames, with different height-bay ratio λ of the structural cells. Each set counts 3 frames wi...